The ruins of Elyra were spread out across kilometers, along broken rocks that floated on separate islands. Vex saw cracks in the ground beneath led to a pure nothingness; Derivan identified that nothingness as the Void, and so they collectively chose to avoid falling.
Not that they weren't going to do that already.
Now that they knew these were the ruins of Elyra, Vex had a better idea of where they needed to go.
"There's a vault near the center of Elyra," he said. "No one's...
2023-03-13 12:47:58 +0000 UTC
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The ominous red door loomed in front of them. Vex had chosen to deem it the ORB, for "ominous red boundary". No one had really taken on the name yet, but they hadn't disputed him on it, either, so he was confident they'd pick up on it eventually.
"About time we go through," Misa said, eyeing it.
"If we do, I'm not sure we're going to be able to help the rebellion if anything goes wrong," Sev said. "This thing—"
"The ORB," Vex supplied.
"Yes, Vex," Sev sighed. "The OR...
2023-03-10 11:45:29 +0000 UTC
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Figuring out what to do next was rather more complicated than it should have been, Vex thought.
Jakka and his children could not be allowed to go free, that was a given. The rebels would have to capture and house them — far easier said than done, although Helix was insistent that they would be able to do it.
Vex had no idea how. He seemed fully intent on just dragging their bodies through the streets.
"You're not going to just drag them through the streets, right?" Vex ask...
2023-03-08 11:49:13 +0000 UTC
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The nice thing about <A World Without a System> was really the time dilation aspect of it. It gave Derivan so much time compared to the people that were on Obreve proper — time for him to use Shift, open up a portal, recharge, and then use Shift again. In that amount of time, only about an hour would have passed on Obreve.
It took him ten hours to recharge fully.
That amount of dilation gave them the time to inspect the details of everyth...
2023-03-06 13:50:11 +0000 UTC
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"You didn't file form E27," Larok replied promptly. Helix gave him a dumbstruck look, and Larok waved him off. "That makes you liable to a seizure of assets."
"And you thought you'd take it yourself, and enlist Ashion to steal from me?" the old orc asked. His voice was pompous, as if he didn't consider either of them a threat despite everything they'd just done.
Helix supposed he had a point. If they were willing to show themselves after they'd seen everything he could do, then th...
2023-03-03 10:18:55 +0000 UTC
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"Vex better be grateful for this," Helix muttered.
He didn't mean it, of course. At this point, he was fighting for far more than just his brother. It had taken him time to see that Vex had been right all along, but he'd figured it out eventually.
He owed it to his team the most; Larok in particular, the one member of his team that was with him today.
Helix hadn't known Larok particularly well when he'd first started talking to the man; Larok had just had the misfortune of b...
2023-03-01 10:14:51 +0000 UTC
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Derivan's next steps were what he had already planned to do, system power or no. It seemed only right.
He couldn't spend forever in the Void, of course. His friends were waiting for him, and even with Stability being his new Sign, there was only so much it could do in the face of the Void; given time, even that would erode away. But there was so much here to remember, and with every second he wasted, more of it was lost.
"What happened to your arm, anyway?" Jelevar asked him befor...
2023-02-27 14:26:16 +0000 UTC
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Derivan moved through the Void, his mind still racing. The ant was two or three steps ahead of him. He'd asked it for its name, and it had produced an impossible-to-replicate series of clicks, then sighed.
You may call me Juniper, the ant said. It's what a lot of the others call me.
Derivan had nodded.
Now, they were making their way through the Void. He had no idea how the ant managed to find its way around — as far as Derivan could tell,...
2023-02-24 15:29:15 +0000 UTC
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Derivan stared at the inky darkness in front of him.
It was familiar, actually. Derivan recognized now that he'd encountered such pure darkness before — when they'd recklessly crashed into the dungeon in Misa's bonus room as it was experiencing a dungeon break. It was where they'd first encountered a Reality Anchor.
He wondered — for a single, absurd moment — if he was in front of the void where Elyra's Reality Anchor was obtained. But no, that didn't make sense; there were ...
2023-02-22 14:38:10 +0000 UTC
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To say that the hall erupted into chaos would be a bit of an understatement.
It wasn't that anyone attacked — far from it. No one seemed remotely interested in attacking Vex, for all that their immediate reaction had been to raise their weapons. Half the priests were whispering amongst themselves, glancing at one another surreptitiously; the other half were staring raptly at the king, waiting for him to give a response.
And the king, in turn, stared at Vex like he had no idea ho...
2023-02-20 14:29:15 +0000 UTC
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"What... are they?" Vex tried to keep his curiosity and excitement at bay; something about this still felt... off. For one of them, at least; closer inspection showed that one of the three root-tangled books had slightly rotten leaves, and a weaker core. It was... strange, and it made him hesitate.
"They are new books," Isolis said, heedless of his thoughts. "There have not been new books here for a long, long time. It was a joy to find these here. And yet behind them..."
Very gen...
2023-02-17 15:27:42 +0000 UTC
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"Why... is this slope... so steep," Vex wheezed. He didn't know how long he'd been climbing. It hadn't mattered for the first hour or so — it had been tiring, but he was used to being tired! He traveled with three people, one of whom could cure his own exhaustion, another who was a physical monstrosity, and the third of whom was his boyfriend and didn't even have any muscles to feel tired with.
Talking to himself helped him feel better, but changed nothing about the fact that...
2023-02-15 14:19:54 +0000 UTC
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Misa's awareness of her prime self faded. Something about the buzzing in the air drew her attention to this path — it wasn't that she didn't recognize she was still safe and sound in the middle of the Roads, but the more she went down this path, the more she found she couldn't split her focus.
She was here. Her ploy had succeeded, but the Roads had done something to her in turn: something that made her fully present in this body. If not for the tingling awareness in the back ...
2023-02-13 13:03:48 +0000 UTC
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Five.
She was probably Five. The fifth and last simulated iteration, judging by the strange impulse she had to choose the rightmost tunnel. There was every chance she wasn't, of course, and so she proceeded into the path with all due caution; there was no reason to risk herself unnecessarily.
Something felt wrong, though. An unpleasant buzz trickled under her skin from the moment she stepped into the tunnel. Five glanced back and felt her heart skip a beat; instead of a t...
2023-02-10 13:57:00 +0000 UTC
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"Alright, now I just gotta choose a path..."
Misa stared at the five split paths in front of her. Each path seemed almost entirely identical, and even the small differences they did have were entirely cosmetic. It wasn't like a scuff on the dirt of the tunnel was likely to be relevant, and even if it was, she had no way of knowing how it was relevant.
In theory, she had no way of knowing what was at the end of each path.
In theory.
She did still have ...
2023-02-08 12:38:25 +0000 UTC
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Time splintered.
In front of Sev stood an older man — mid-forties or mid-fifties, perhaps. He wore the flowing robes of a priest of the God of the Sun — with the full title capitalized in his head, even, because he couldn't not. Power poured out of him in waves.
"In the light of the sun," the priest intoned. They were the words of an incantation, a prayer. "None may fall."
And it was the truth.
Th...
2023-02-06 13:17:07 +0000 UTC
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The process of forging a connection was more complicated than Onyx had implied. Without Derivan around to use Patch to see exactly what the system was doing, Sev had to rely on his divine sense.
And trying to look through his divine sense was a little like a feeling Sev had long forgotten — the feeling of being shortsighted, and looking at the world without a pair of glasses.
He hadn't needed glasses in so long he'd almost forgotten the feeling entirely.
The syste...
2023-02-03 15:00:07 +0000 UTC
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Sev hadn't said it while the others were there with him, but he was worried.
It was strange that he was the only one the Roads hadn't changed for. Misa had been given a choice. Vex's road led up, whatever that meant. Derivan's path ended in nothing, but presumably there was something for him even there — and even if there wasn't, he was the only one among them that could simply Shift himself out of that situation, especially with the mastery of the stat that he'd gained over ...
2023-02-01 15:36:48 +0000 UTC
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"We're going to be at the Roads soon," Belle said. "Are you sure you want to leave?"
"Sure?" Misa snorted. "No. But we have to."
She didn't look Belle in the eyes. They'd all been traveling together for the past few days — Clyde had taken time off specifically for this, though he didn't elaborate on what the process of taking time off involved, exactly. The journey together had been the closest the seven of them had been, though of course they tended to split o...
2023-01-30 14:34:25 +0000 UTC
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Velykos stood in front of the body, staring silently. The golden thread within him hummed, working full force to keep him from falling apart.
The body was wrong, but he didn't know why.
"This the man that adopted ya?" Harold asked quietly.
"I believe so," Velykos answered, but the truth was that he wasn't sure.
"He's supposed to be a demon, ain't he?" Harold asked. "He don't look much like one to me."
"Daemon," Velykos corrected. He stared again at the b...
2023-01-27 13:55:43 +0000 UTC
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Velykos stared.
It was rare, really, that he experienced anything he found difficult to explain. He had been alive for a long, long time, and had experienced almost everything that could be experienced.
The chill he felt now, though? That was new to him.
The fact that none of Harold's crew had anything to say was equally strange, and left him feeling even more unsettled. Ixiss and Iliss in particular almost always had a witty rejoinder, and yet even they—
"W...
2023-01-25 16:11:44 +0000 UTC
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The ending to that Festival was probably the quickest there had ever been. Not because there was no wonder or celebration to be had — but because the celebration that was left was for themselves, for all the things they had wanted to make permanent but could not. The glyphs of Change and Solidity, despite the associated mana costs, were some of the most flexible glyphs that had ever been created, and the elementals wasted no time in customizing their homes and stores to breathe all...
2023-01-23 16:55:01 +0000 UTC
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"Two new glyphs!" Clyde's voice was incredulous. He hissed out the words as if speaking softly would somehow protect them from the enormous crowd of people just outside his inn. It was essentially just very powerful inn magic that kept all of them out, though he'd refused to explain what exactly 'inn magic' was.
The crowd had gone silent the moment mana began to gather; at most, there were quiet whispers slowly spreading through them, as if they weren't quite sure what they wer...
2023-01-20 16:28:32 +0000 UTC
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Kindness, Sev reflected, could be painful.
Aneryn hadn't wanted to die alone. It was a small thing for Sev to be there for him in those last moments, and yet those last moments had been more than enough to make him care that much more. Aneryn would have been a friend, he was sure.
Maybe he had been.
Sev didn't know what to make of those strange flashes of memory he had received, and he was too tired to think hard on it; his heart still ached. Very slowly, he gathere...
2023-01-18 15:29:07 +0000 UTC
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The sky above Mundane was a sight to remember.
It wasn't just the fireworks, the streaks of magic that flew up into the air and shaped themselves into beautiful works of art. It wasn't the stray sparks from the many duels happening all over the town, with elements crashing across the sky. It wasn't even the gentle play of light across the clouds, though that sight was beautiful in and of itself.
It was the fact that those panes of reflective air were falling.
Sev wa...
2023-01-16 14:35:36 +0000 UTC
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Sev didn't answer for a while. He watched the stars spin above them, felt the anxiety rise and fall; eventually, it left him, and he let out a slow breath.
The emotion wasn't his own. Not exactly. He didn't know where it had come from, but Derivan's words had struck a chord within him, calling forth a memory. The dissonance he felt wasn't even from the memory itself — it was from the way it rubbed up against the rest of his thoughts, jarring and not quite his own.
He let it go. ...
2023-01-13 16:34:54 +0000 UTC
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It was remarkable, the degree to which the town of Mundane changed.
For one day and one day only, the shadows didn't have to worry about keeping the town as plain and simple as possible; they could decorate and rearrange as much as they wished, and they seemed to take the opportunity to really let loose with their creativity. It almost made Sev a little sad to look at it. He wondered if this was the town they would build, if they had the opportunity. Maybe if they fixed whatever was wro...
2023-01-11 15:00:06 +0000 UTC
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Clyde's inn was nice and comfortable, but the Horizon cafe had become a second haunt for them in the past few weeks. There was something about the aroma and ambience of the place that kept it wonderfully comforting, and that comfort was something they needed, after the training.
They didn't stick together anymore — not completely. Each of them had different things to work on, and couldn't always work on those things in close vicinity with the others; eventually, they had agreed it wou...
2023-01-09 16:51:28 +0000 UTC
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The ground squelched under Xothok's feet, and he barely suppressed the disgusted grimace that crawled through his frame. He was distantly aware that everything here was a product of his mind, or so Kothos claimed, but it didn't make any of this feel any less real.
Stepping over viscera was not how he had pictured the day going.
"It's not real," Kothos said, for perhaps the third time, and Xothok leveled a glare at him.
"So you've said," he said, his voice c...
2023-01-06 16:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Mercy was something that could only be afforded by the powerful.
That was the lesson Xothok had taken away from the fight between his team and the four adventurers that had utterly overwhelmed them. Derivan, Vex, Misa, Sev — the names were practically burned into his head. They could have killed all of them, and as far as Xothok was concerned, they would have been justified in doing so.
They hadn't. But they could afford not to; they were never in any danger. His team had never ...
2023-01-04 15:45:34 +0000 UTC
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